Exploring the causal relationships between musical features and physiological indicators of emotion

The relationship between music and physiological indicators of emotion has attracted increased attention in the past two decades. However, the limitations of small sample sizes and the difficulty in designing ecological studies involving physiology and emotion make it hard to gain convincing and practical insight into the mechanisms behind them. In this paper, we propose a novel combination of spectral clustering and cross-correlation analysis that can group people who have similar response patterns to music, and show a causal relationship between changes in music and a human's electrodermal activity (EDA). We present some interesting findings on population differences in sensitivity to musical features and in emotional reactions by analyzing 344 valid listening samples of three classical pieces.